The recent ‘Consultation on the second Research Excellence Framework' (REF) in the UK contains an annex that signals the extension of the open access mandate to monographs. In the service of promoting discussion, rather than prescribing a forward route, this article estimates the costs of implementing such a mandate based on REF 2014 volume, taking the criteria signalled in the annex, and identifies funding sources that could support it. We estimate that to publish 75% of anticipated monographic submission output for the next REF would require approximately £96m investment over the census period. This is equivalent to £19.2m per year. Academic library budgets as they are currently apportioned would not support this cost. However, these sums are but a fraction of the total quality-related funding, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council budgets. We close with a series of provocative suggestions for how the mandate could be implemented.

Open access (OA) is advocated by science funders, policymakers and researchers alike. It will most likely be the default way of publishing in the not-so-distant future. Nonetheless, the dominant approach to achieve OA at the moment—journal flipping—could have adverse long-term effects for science. To try to stir debate, we here present two dichotomic scenarios for open access in 20 years' time [journal flipping vs. a public open access infrastructure].

The observed payments from our experiment together with the preliminary results from other experiments (that is, Cogent OA) indicate that PWYW may work in the context of open access publishing. The results suggest that a substantial fraction of authors do pay APCs voluntarily, in some cases even more than regularly asked.

The project had two core findings. First that the shift from an aim of changing behaviour, to changing culture, has both subtle and profound implications for policy design and implementation. A particular finding is that the single point of contact that many data management and sharing policies create where a Data Management Plan is required at grant submission but then not further utilised is at best neutral and likely counter productive in supporting change in researcher culture.

Only a small percentage of books published as dissertations were found in ProQuest and then subsequently in IRs. The number of libraries holding book titles with corresponding dissertations in IRs dropped between 2014 and 2015.

Findings suggest that in reality criteria beyond technical or scientific soundness can and do influence editorial decisions. Deviations from the original OAMJ model are both publisher supported (in the form of requirements for an article to be “worthy” of publication) and practice driven (in the form of some reviewers and editors applying traditional peer review criteria to OAMJ submissions). Also publishers believe post-publication evaluation of novelty, significance and relevance remains problematic.

Other publishers—and libraries and universities—that are working in collaboration with, or customers of, various Digital Science businesses might wish to give greater attention to the implications. First, Digital Science itself may soon become an operating unit of Springer Nature. Second, this could well yield changes to the Digital Science strategy, if its current model as an investor were to give way to the operating integrations that have been a hallmark of Elsevier’s strategy.

NLM needs your input. We are experimenting with a new PubMed search algorithm, as well as a modern, mobile-first user interface, and want to know what you think. You can try out these experimental elements at PubMed Labs, a website we created for the very purpose of giving potential new PubMed features a test drive and gathering user opinions.

Looking ahead to the next stage of its development, Philip Cohen considers how SocArXiv might challenge the peer review system to be more efficient and transparent, firstly by confronting the bias that leads many who benefit from the status quo to characterise mooted alternatives as extreme. The value and implications of openness at the various decision points in the system must be debated, as should potentially more disruptive innovations such as non-exclusive review and publication or crowdsourcing reviews.

It updates article-count and status-code information (but not APC/fee information) for gray OA journals not in DOAJ, adding full-year 2016 article counts and January-June 2017 counts, doubled for ease of comparisons. Journals in Gray OA 2012-2016 that have been added to DOAJ have been removed from the new report.

ME [Michael Eisen]: The most important thing to do now is to get publishers—commercial and non-profit—out of the process. The whole industry is unnecessary and needlessly cumbersome and expensive. We should all just publish in places like bioRxiv (assuming its software gets better and produces finished documents people are happy to read) and do all peer review post publication. There should be little or no money transacted in the process—the infrastructure should be subsidized so it’s free to both publish and access all the content.

Termination of transfer allows creators (or, in some cases, their family members) to regain copyrights to creative works they may have signed away decades ago. Our tool helps them understand if those termination rights exist, and if not, when they may exist in the future. With rights back in hand, authors have many options for getting their works in front of new audiences, from sharing their works with the public using a Creative Commons license to negotiating new agreements with publishers.

The seductive allure of a commercial mega repository is two-fold: (1) everything is conveniently in one place, and (2) a company is taking care of the dreary and expensive business of running it.

Everything seems fine: problem solved! That is until something goes wrong, such as the repository being bought and controlled by a publisher or being threatened by lawsuits by a coterie of publishers.

Then it's important to remember: it's a company, and companies exist to make a profit.

Heh, companies are great. I wouldn't have just had that tasty cup of coffee without them. But, we should be very clear about what motivates companies and controls their behavior. And we shouldn't be shocked if they do things that aren't motivated by lofty goals.

I know: institutional repositories are hard work. The bloom is off the rose. But they exist to serve higher education, not make money, and they part of the academic communities they serve. And they can't be bought. And their universities don't often go out of business. And there are a lot of them. And they are not likely to be attractive targets for lawsuits unless something has gone very, very wrong at the local level.

Copyright is complicated. No one is advocating that we ignore it and just shove e-prints into IR's willy-nilly. Getting faculty to understand the ins and outs of e-print copyright is no picnic, nor is monitoring for compliance. But the battle is easier to fight at the local level where one-on-one faculty to librarian communication is possible.

For self-archiving to flourish in the long run, institutional repositories must flourish. By and large, librarians establish, run, and support them, and they are the quiet heroes of green open access who will continue to provide a sustainable and reliable infrastructure for self-archiving.

As I said, publishers are also co-opting green OA. They are doing this by buying up repository platforms like SSRN and bepress, for instance, and by imposing lengthy embargoes before green OA papers can be made freely available. Again, the OA movement has assisted in this by, for instance, advocating for and supporting OA policies that accept publisher-imposed embargoes as a given, and by partnering with publishers in initiatives that turn repositories into little more than search interfaces. This has the effect of directing users away from repositories to legacy publishers’ sites (see here for instance, and here).

In August, bepress sold their company to Elsevier, a business with a history of aggressive confidentiality agreements, steep price increases, and opaque data mining practices. In their acquisition of bepress and other companies like SSRN and Mendeley, Elsevier demonstrates a move toward the consolidation and monopolization of products and services impacting all areas of the research lifecycle.

We are worried about the long-term impacts from these acquisitions and are concerned that such changes are not in the best interests of the library community. Therefore, we feel obligated to begin exploring alternatives.

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DigitalKoans provides news and commentary on digital copyright, digital curation, digital repository, open access, research data management, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. From April 2005 through March 2016, DigitalKoans had over 13.4 million visitors, over 60.5 million file requests, and over 45.3 million page views. Excluding spiders, there were over 8 million visitors and over 19.8 million page views. It is available via e-mail, RSS feed, and Twitter.